Voices of Jewish-Russian Literature: An Anthology by Maxim D. Shrayer

Author:Maxim D. Shrayer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Academic Studies Press
Published: 2018-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

BORIS PASTERNAK

Boris Pasternak (1890–1960), poet, translator, and novelist, was born in Moscow, where his parents had moved from Odessa in 1889. A refined artistic milieu enveloped Pasternak and his three siblings: from his father, the painter Leonid Pasternak (1862–1945), Pasternak inherited a gift for seeing; from his mother, Rozalia Kaufman (1867–1939), a gifted pianist, Pasternak received his musical talents. The Pasternaks traced their lineage back to Sephardic Jews, to Don Isaac ben-Yehudah (1437–1508). Although conversion to Christianity would have made things much easier for Pasternak’s father at the beginning of his career, he never took the step on moral grounds. In 1894, Leonid Pasternak was invited to teach at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture; later the rank of Academician of Painting was bestowed upon him. In 1923 Leonid Pasternak’s book Rembrandt and Jews in His Work appeared in Berlin in Russian and was later published in Hebrew translation. Bialik wrote admiringly of Leonid Pasternak as a Jewish artist.

The young Pasternak studied music theory and composition in 1903–9. Alexander Scriabin himself encouraged him, but the absence of perfect pitch hindered the future poet. In 1913, Pasternak was graduated from the Historical-Philological Faculty of Moscow University. His thesis dealt with Hermann Cohen’s philosophy, and in May–August 1912 he attended summer school at the University of Marburg. Hermann Cohen asked him to stay for graduate work; Pasternak turned down the attractive offer.

In a letter to Jacqueline de Proyart dated 2 May 1959, Boris Pasternak spoke of having been baptized as an infant by his nanny in the Orthodox Church. Pasternak’s leading biographers Lazar Fleishman and Christopher Barnes both suggest that the unconfirmed story of the infant Pasternak’s conversion was a fantasy that the adult Pasternak cultivated in the 1940s–50s. As late as 1912, in his matriculation papers from Marburg University, Pasternak indicated his faith as “Mosaic.” In 1922, when he married his first wife, the artist Evgenia Lurie, the marriage was certified by a Moscow rabbi. Although no evidence points to Pasternak’s conversion at a later time, in the 1940s–50s he regularly went to Orthodox Church. Be all this as it may, the argument in negotiating the Judaic–Christian—and Jewish–Russian—boundaries in Pasternak’s worldview should not hinge on whether or not he was converted (a compensatory myth for the adult Pasternak) but on the Christian supercessionist beliefs and assimilationist convictions expressed in his writings, above all in Doctor Zhivago (1944–55; published 1957). Pasternak regarded his Jewish origin an unfortunate complication. In a letter to the Judeophilic Maxim Gorky dated 7 January 1928, he wrote, “With my place of birth, with my childhood circumstances, with my love, instincts, and inclinations, I should not have been born a Jew” (trans. Lazar Fleishman).

Pasternak’s poems first appeared in 1913; his first collection, Twin in the Clouds, came out a year later. With fellow poets Nikolay Aseev and Sergey Bobrov, Pasternak joined Centrifuge, a group of moderate Moscow futurists. His second collection, Over the Barriers, appeared in 1917, and that summer he finished My Sister—Life, which he considered his first book.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.